Contents

Biography

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Early
years

Mizoguchi was born in Tokyo,
one of three children. His father was a roofing carpenter. The
family was modestly middle-class until his father tried to make
a living selling raincoats to soldiers during the Russo-Japanese war. The war ended too
quickly for the investment to succeed; his family circumstances
turned abject and they had to give his elder sister up for adoption
and moved from Hongo to Asakusa. The adoptive family eventually sold
his sister as a geisha, an
event which profoundly affected Mizoguchi's outlook on life.
Between this and his father's brutal treatment of his mother and
sister, he maintained a fierce resistance against his father
throughout his life.

Mizoguchi left school at the age of 13 to work and to study
graphic arts at the Aohashi Institute, and his first job was as an
advertising designer in Kobe, in
1913. In 1915 his mother died, and his elder sister, putting his
father in a home, took in her two younger brothers in Tokyo. Mizoguchi entered the Tokyo
film industry as an actor in
1920; three years later he would become a full-fledged director, at
the Nikkatsu studio, directing Aini
yomigaeruhi (The Resurrection of Love), his first
movie, during a workers' strike.

Film
career

Mizoguchi's early works had been exploratory, mainly genre
works, remakes of German Expressionism and adaptions
of Eugene
O'Neill and Leo
Tolstoy. In these early years Mizoguchi worked quickly,
sometimes churning out a film in weeks. These would account for
over fifty films from the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of which
are now lost.

After the Great Kantō
earthquake on September 1, 1923, Mizoguchi moved to Nikkatsu’s
Kyoto studios and was working
there until a scandal caused him to be temporarily suspended:
Yuriko Ichijo, a call girl whom he was co-habiting with, attacked
and wounded Mizoguchi's back with a razor-blade.

Several of Mizoguchi's later films were keiko eiga or
"tendency
films," in which Mizoguchi first explored his socialist tendencies and moulded his famous
signature preoccupations. Later in his life Mizoguchi maintained
that his career as a serious director did not begin until Sisters of
the Gion and Naniwa Elegy, both dating from
1936.

In his middle films, Mizoguchi began to be hailed as a director
of 'new realism': social documents of a Japan that was making its
transition from feudalism into modernism. The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemums (1939) won a prize with the Education
Department; like the two abovementioned films, it explores the
deprecatory role of women in an unfairly male-centered society.
During this time, Mizoguchi also developed his signature
"one-scene-one-shot" approach to cinema. The meticulousness and
authenticity of his set designer Hiroshi Mizutani would
contribute to Mizoguchi's frequent use of wide-angled lensing.

Kenji Mizoguchi travelling through Europe, 1953

During the war, Mizoguchi was forced to make compromises for the
military government as propaganda; the most famous is a retelling
of the Samuraibushido
classic The 47
Ronin (1941), an epic jidai geki ("historical
drama"). [1]

Post-war
recognition

Although regarded, like his contemporary Yasujirō Ozu, as
outdated and old-fashioned by Japanese audience immediately after
the war, Mizoguchi was rediscovered, particularly by Cahiers du
cinéma critics like Jacques Rivette, in the West. After a
phase inspired by Japanese women's suffrage, which produced radical films like
Victory of the Women (1946) and My Love Has Been
Burning (1949), Mizoguchi took a turn to the jidai-geki — or period drama, re-made
from stories from Japanese folklore or period history — together with
long-time screenwriter and collaborator Yoshikata Yoda. It was to
be his most celebrated series of works, including The Life of
Oharu (1952), which won him international recognition and
which he considered his best film, and Ugetsu (1953), which won the Silver Lion at
the Venice Film Festival. Sansho the
Bailiff (1954) takes a premise from feudal Japan (and the
short story by Mori
Ōgai) and reworks it as a Confucianmorality tale. Of his nearly 100 films,
only two — Tales of the
Taira Clan (1955) and Princess Yang Kwei-Fei
(1955) — were made in colour.

Mizoguchi died in Kyoto of leukemia at the age of 58, by
which time he had become recognized as one of the three masters of
Japanese cinema, together with Yasujirō Ozu and
Akira
Kurosawa. In all he made (according to his memory) about 75
films, although most of his early ones were lost. In 1975, Kaneto Shindo filmed a documentary about
Mizoguchi, Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film
Director.

Themes and
aesthetics

Mizoguchi's films are well known for their championing of women.
He has been called the first major feminist director, though
modern audiences may find that his themes do not line up with the
modern concept of feminism. Typically he revealed women's
position in the Japanese society as downtrodden and oppressed, and
showed that they may be capable of greater nobility between the
sexes. He made many films on the plight of the geisha, but his
protagonists could derive from anywhere: prostitutes, workers,
street activists, housewives, and feudal princesses.

Mizoguchi's films have an aesthetic that is reminiscent of Japanese art. He
favoured long takes and rich, painterly mise-en-scene, seldom
with the Western-favoured device of the close-up; a typical scene can take a few
minutes, and places emphasis on lighting and placement — much like
the works of Josef von Sternberg. Its formalized
beauty is balanced by its involvement with the audience through the
subject-matter, skillfully inviting sympathy for the main
characters; in his finest works the emotionalism can be
extraordinarily moving.

Mizoguchi's obsession with rehearsals was infamous, and could
become a nightmare for his actresses. His preference for a long
take meant there was little room for errors: there are stories of
him rehearsing one shot nearly a hundred times. Kinuyo Tanaka,
Mizoguchi's regular actress, once recounted that Mizoguchi asked
her to read a whole library in preparation of a role.